The Exposure Project: October 2009

Friday, October 30, 2009

Bryan Graf's Album

I recently got down to The Wild Project to see Bryan Graf's exhibition Wildlife Analysis - which, if you're curious, is absolutely worth checking out. After going to the show, I visited Graf's website only to find it updated with a number of new projects. Album, images of which are posted below, particularly caught my eye. Also, make sure to spend some time with Wildlife Analysis, Color Movements and Time Traveling though.

Unfortunately, Graf's show is only up until tomorrow. However, if you find yourself on the lower east side tomorrow and are looking for something to do, swing by the gallery for a quick peek.

From "Album"
© Bryan Graf

Maury Gortemiller's Speed Queens & No Anthem

I found my way to Maury Gortemiller's website today and discovered a lot of intriguing new work. The images below, from Speed Queens and No Anthem, explore:

"the residues of human experience. The overlooked phenomena, the flotsam left behind can impart a wealth of information about individuals and cultural attitudes. My photographs maintain the physicality of ordinary, everyday objects while opening up their potential imaginative and conceptual meanings."

"Cave, 2009" (From Speed Queens)
© Maury Gortemiller

"Grasshopper, 2008" (From No Anthem)
© Maury Gortemiller

"Breathing Machine, 2009" (From Speed Queens)
© Maury Gortemiller

"Support The Troops, 2009" (From Speed Queens)
© Maury Gortemiller

"Sunlight, 2009" (From Speed Queens)
© Maury Gortemiller

Richard Kolker's The Game

I found Richard Kolker's work recently while looking through the top 175 entrants for this year's Critical Mass review. His images, comprised of both traditional photography and 3D modelling techniques, addresses the pervasiveness of online social hierarchies such as "Second Life." In the statement for the work, Kolker goes on to say:

"The images portray the moment when the real and the virtual worlds meet and represent imagined potential emotional triggers as the player recognises the blurring of the real / unreal boundary and is aware of the conflict that exists in his time being divided between the two."

"Logging On"
© Richard Kolker

"Playground"
© Richard Kolker

"One Evening, Any Evening"
© Richard Kolker

"Work"
© Richard Kolker

"Window"
© Richard Kolker

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Graphic Intersections Now Online

After nearly a year, our most recent endeavor, Graphic Intersections, is now online. Based on the old Surrealist/Dadaist game the Exquisite Corpse, this project seeks to unite disparate artists, while emphasizing a system of response entirely rooted in unmediated visual reaction. Graphic Intersections brings together images by:

Ben Alper, Anastasia Cazabon, Thomas Damgaard, Scott Eiden, Grant Ernhart, Jon Feinstein, Elizabeth Fleming, Alan George, Hee Jin Kang, Drew Kelly, Michael Marcelle, Chris Mottalini, Ed Panar, Bradley Peters, Cara Phillips, Noel Rodo-Vankeulen, Irina Rozovsky, Brea Souders, Jane Tam and Grant Willing

Stay tuned in the coming months for exciting Graphic Intersections exhibition news!

Monday, October 26, 2009

Photographic Typologies: Chris Jordan

Chris Jordan recently updated his website with a new series entitled Midway: Message From The Gyre. In the statement for the work, he explains:

"These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent."

From "Midway: Message From The Gyre"
© Chris Jordan

Friday, October 23, 2009

Alexander Binder's Traum

Alexander Binder has got to be one of the most prolific photographer's working today. Just last month, I posted his first completed video work pluton/calabi-yau. Earlier today, Binder got back in touch to let me know of a brand new series entitled Traum - an extensive, beautiful and evocative project photographed this past summer "in the dreamlike landscape of Iceland."

I would highly recommend taking some time to peruse and digest the images from Traum.

From "Traum"
© Alexander Binder

Thursday, October 22, 2009

ARTribe Benefit Exhibition: Photography For The Next Generation

ARTribe recently announced the photographers for the ARTribe Benefit Exhibition: Photography For The Next Generation and I'm very pleased to announce that Exposure Project members Anastasia Cazabon and Ben Alper will both have work in the show. Also included in the exhibition are photographs by:

Molly Berman, Richard Burnam Fink, Erik Boker, Alana Celii, Natalie Chan, Samantha Cohn, Buck Ellison, Gregg Evans, Elleser Galleta, Chibi Lai, Matteo Lonardi, Reuben Mills, Stephanie Neel, Marisa Prefer, Ana Ratner, Marissa Schwartz, Kate Stone, Sara Urbaez, Olivia Wachsberger and Greg Wasserstrom

From the ARTribe website:

"All proceeds will go toward building a girl’s school in Jaisalmer, India founded by CITTA, a registered charity dedicated to providing assistance to marginalized or indigenous communities.

Tickets for the opening reception are $10 for students and $20 for adults. All of the artwork at the exhibition will be available for sale to benefit CITTA. A preview will be available for advance purchase on-line prior to the opening. Purchases and donations can be made at CITTA.org (Events)."

ARTribe EXHIBITION: Photgraphy For The Next Generation
November 21st, 2009
Swiss Institute
485 Broadway, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10012
6:00 - 10:00

Andrew Phelps' Not Nigita

The most recent issue of Ahorn Magazine features an interview with Andrew Phelps which centers around his new project Not Nigita. In addition to highlighting a selection of the images, the piece presents an interview with the artist - an excerpt of which can be found below:

Ahorn: In the preface of the book you say that the work is about “not understanding Niigata”. Everything, every photograph, under this light, seems to represent a “No-Where”. You were able to collect stories about Niigata, but what did you see in these photographs about the real Niigata and what is, on the other side, the fictional part of the story you built?

Andrew Phelps: The term “No-Where” is an important one for me when I think of my photographs on a formal level. It is a combination of a certain lighting, film, paper etc that tends to lend a bit of a stage-like quality to the images. I think this is very important for my work to lift the subject/landscape out of its normal context, almost as if all of the images were made in one shooting, in one studio, with one lighting set up. This type of work is anything but objective. It is a very subjective way of working but has disguised itself as “documentary” through its style. There is no smoke or mirrors, but who and what I choose to photograph, and more importantly, who and what I DON’T photograph, or decide to leave outside the frame, is very important. It is a very egoistic way of working. I’m not there to tell the story of Niigata, though that is what is expected of me as a photographer. The title alludes to my skepticism of this assumption that my camera will tell the truth about a place. I found myself trying to make my HIGLEY images in this place that was very foreign to me and I realized I would and could never understand a culture through photographing it, so I made that interesting cultural gap my subject.

Ahorn: There is a feeling that connects the books you’ve made in these last years: Higley, Baghdad Suite, and now Not Niigata. The city is always a place where we have to think intensely about what is happening around us. We have to stop, look at that photographs, and think about what those cities are, what they represent. In Higley we can see the new side, development of the American Southwest. In Baghdad Suite we ‘re trying to believe that one day the phoenix will be born again and rise from the ashes. And what is Niigata? The atmosphere seems quite meditative.

Phelps: It is for sure that my work in Niigata can’t be as complete and rounded as a series like HIGLEY which took years to make in a place that was once my home. NOT NIIGATA would have been worked to death and probably been useless if I had traveled there time and time again as I did in Higley,AZ. NOT NIIGATA is all about the brief encounter as a traveler, passing through, always lost and illiterate. I think the feeling you mention is one of slowing down the pace with which we usually move through such places. When I decide to set up the camera, it is a slow process and there are no snap-shots to speak of. I am the first to admit that my photographs seldom jump out and grab ones attention right away; they seem even a bit boring at first, so thanks for using the word meditative, that sounds nicer! With the camera, I have the excuse to slow down and stare at something mundane, which in the case of Niigata, is often simultaneously something exotic."

From "Not Nigita"
© Andrew Phelps

Monday, October 19, 2009

Eric White's Borderlands

Eric White got in touch the other day to share some images from his series Borderlands. In the statement for the work, he explains:

"Borderlands began as a fascination with the Berlin Wall, that towering symbol of tyranny; on one side freedom, the other oppression. It is at once both an observation and a question: With so much to gain by their crossing, can walls really stem the flow of people, the flow of ideas yearning to cross their borders?

It is obvious to anyone crossing the US-Mexico border that while this fence may mark the boundary between two sovereign countries, it cannot contain those who refuse to be imprisoned or limited by the separation it seeks to enforce.

Millions of people journey across this border every year, making it the most heavily-crossed border in the world. As the US government asserts increasing control over the boundary, however, it has also become one of the most violent and deadly areas of the world.

The new sections of fence erected in the last years of the Bush Administration have had the effect not of stopping people from crossing, but merely changing where they cross. These treacherous areas are becoming increasingly desolated and deadly. These are the areas Borderland seeks to highlight and explore.

As a child growing up in New Mexico, this proximity to the border was a source of wonder and delight. It is not difficult to imagine a child on the opposite side of the border experiencing exactly the same delight and wonder. I may not advocate an open border policy but again I ask: can a wall really stop the flow?"

From "Borderlands"
© Eric White

Friday, October 16, 2009

Sites Down

Just a head's up...both my site and The Exposure Project site will be down for a few days while transferring to a new hosting company. Sorry for the inconvenience.

-Ben Alper

Leslie Hewitt's Riffs On Real Time

Some of Leslie Hewitt's images from her series Riffs On Real Time are currently on view as part of the "New Photography 2009" exhibition at MOMA. She shares the walls with some of contemporary photography's most interesting collectors, appropriators and collagists - Walead Beshty, Daniel Gordon, Carter Mull, Sterling Ruby, and Sara VanDerBeek. The press release for the show states:

"New Photography 2009 is a thematic presentation of significant recent work in photography that examines and expands the conventional definitions of the medium. Although the six artists in this installation—Walead Beshty, Daniel Gordon, Leslie Hewitt, Carter Mull, Sterling Ruby, and Sara VanDerBeek—represent diverse points of view, working methods, and pictorial modes ranging from abstract to representational, their images all begin in the studio or the darkroom and result from processes involving collection, assembly, and manipulation. Many of the works are made with everyday materials and objects, as well as images from the Internet, magazines, newspapers, and books. Some of the artists also work in other mediums and their pictures relate to disciplines such as drawing, sculpture, and installation. As traditional photographic techniques are being quickly replaced by digital technologies, the artists included here examine the process and structure of making photographs."

'Pure Beauty' - An Interview With John Baldessari

The new issue of Seesaw Magazine is now online and contains a wonderful interview with John Baldessari conducted by Aaron Schuman. Below is an excerpt from their exchange:

"Profile with Ear and Nose, (Color) "
© John Baldessari

Aaron Schuman: In your early photo-based work, you took your own photographs and applied them to a canvas. Then you had someone else take pictures of you; then you asked others to take photographs for you; and finally you started to use found imagery, such as film-stills, photos from newspapers, and so on. Why did you gradually take yourself out of the pictures, so to speak?

John Baldessari: It was mainly about trying to escape my own good taste, or good taste in general. I think that each time you do some art you get better at it, so I was trying to figure out a way to work against that. Anytime that I could not take a photograph – where I could just give instructions to somebody else to take a photograph – I would do it; if I needed a photograph of a house, I would just tell one of my assistants, ‘Go out and photograph a house.’ Then I would be honor-bound to accept it, because that’s all that I’d asked for. I didn’t say to them what kind of house, or what kind of architecture I wanted – it was just a picture of whatever they thought a house was. I had other ploys too. I’d sit a camera in front of a TV on a tripod, and put an intervalometer on it so that every five minutes it would take a picture, and I would use those photographs. Another thing that I’d do was compose a photograph perfectly using a tripod, and then pick the tripod up, move it a foot, and take the picture. It was all about getting away from good taste.

Aaron Schuman: Why were you intent on avoiding good taste?

John Baldessari: Back then, I said that I was trying to work against my own good taste because I figured that good taste is going to come out anyway, no matter what you do, so there’s no reason to work at it.

Aaron Schuman: Were you trying to get away from the craftsmanship aspect of it all as well?

John Baldesarri: The craft part of it didn’t interest me at all. Getting the perfect gradation of tone, or making a beautiful print, wasn’t an issue. Of course, I had gone through all of that in my own darkroom, so I knew what it was to make a fine print, but it didn’t interest me; I was just interested in the imagery – in the ideas that the photographs represented.

Aaron Schuman: It seems like many artists of your generation incorporated photography into their work in order to rebel against traditional notions of art – in a sense, the medium itself represented the antithesis of ‘high art’ or ‘fine art’, at least in the conventional sense. Today, photography plays a much more central role within fine art practice – do you feel that using photographs, and what that represents, has changed since you began to do it yourself?

John Baldessari: Now all of those battles have been won, so it’s no longer an issue. Within art connoisseurship and curatorial practice, photography used to be ghettoized; paintings were at the front, photographs were at the back – they would be always be separated. And as I said earlier, back then there was a huge gap between the history of photography and the history of painting. And even at MoMA today, you still have a Photography Department and a Painting and Sculpture Department. What I love about MoMA is that, according to the Photography Department what I do is not photography, and according to the Painting Department what I do is not painting. So that just points out the ridiculousness of the situation. When I was teaching in the late 1960s and 70s, I would say to the students, ‘Just use a camera, because I can teach you everything with a camera that I could teach you with paint.’ And actually, one of my first students at the University of California, San Diego was Allen Sekula – he was always taking photographs in class, and it seemed like he could do everything he needed to do with a camera.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Caitlin Duennebier's The Devil and Mother Duennebier

Our good friend Caitlin Duennebier recently sent over some images from her series The Devil and Mother Duennebier. Check it out.

Sasha Rudensky's Demons

I'd seen Sasha Rudensky's project Demons a while back, but was happy to rediscover it the other day. Comprised largely of portraiture of friends and family, the series is an attempt to recreate the artist's childhood "based on exaggerated and perhaps even subconsciously created memories."

I would also recommend checking out Rudensky's project Remains - an exploration of the political and social transformation of the former Soviet Union filtered through a view of intimate details of everyday life.